Voicemail is a centralized system managing telephone messages for a user, and is commonly seen in enterprise-type environments where a voicemail system provides telephone message management for a large number of people. A typical voicemail system can allow the answering and recording of multiple voicemail messages in parallel. Additional functionality often associated with voicemail systems is the ability to store incoming voice messages in personalized mailboxes associated with a particular user's phone number or extension. Users are capable of forwarding messages to another mailbox, and sending messages to one or more voicemail users. In conjunction with both of these functions, a user can add a voice introduction to a forwarded message and store a voice message for future delivery to one or more other users.
Other functionality associated with voicemail systems is the ability to make calls to a telephone or paging service to notify a user a message has arrived in their mailbox, as well as the ability to provide messaging notification by SMS, a special dial tone, one or more lights, or using caller ID signaling. Furthermore, a user can be alerted to the existence of a new voicemail message through the integration and communication between the voice message server and a mail client. For example, a voicemail server can forward a .wav file that includes the left message to an email server that then displays the voicemail message as a playable file in a user's mailbox.
There are also automated voicemail systems for processing incoming speech based on messages. For example, a voicemail processor includes a transcription component for transcribing one or more voicemail messages into text, a text retrieval component for indexing the one or more transcribed voicemail messages, and information extraction component for identifying selected information within the one or more indexed voicemail messages, and a user interface for displaying the identified selected information from the one or more indexed voicemail messages.